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IN THE CROSSFIRE OF BOLSHEVISM AND NAZISM: Edith Stein

By Marielena Montesino de Stuart

Edith Stein was born on October 12, 1891 in Breslau, Lower Silesia, in the former Kingdom of Prussia (now Wroclaw, Poland). She grew up in a pious Jewish home– only to become an atheist by the age of fourteen. Much could be stated or speculated about what led her to such an empty state, but in keeping with my positive outlook on matters of life and faith, based on the graces bestowed upon us by the Holy Spirit, in this short commentary I will concentrate on Edith Stein’s life as a convert to Catholicism.

Sainthood

The fact that Edith Stein was made a Saint by John Paul II is rather unfortunate, because this means that she fell into the highly-questionable “saint factory” period that the modernists in the Vatican instituted, which included doing away with the Devil’s Advocate in 1983– who until then, had been the examiner who questioned the details, conscience and actions of those involved in saint-making. But the fact that Edith Stein’s canonization took place during this modernist period does not mean that she wasn’t a saint. In fact, I believe that Edith Stein is a saint for having the courage to go against the two groups that surrounded her and confounded her most of her life: religious and socialist (atheist) Silesian Jews in the former Kingdom of Prussia.

I consider the second group, the atheist Jews, to have been the bigger challenge for Edith, since she had embraced atheism in her life as an intellectual.

In the crossfire of Bolshevism and Nazism

Indeed, it was in the Kingdom of Prussia where Karl Marx was also born seventy three years before Edith Stein– and it was in the Kingdom of Prussia where Marx’s evil socialist theories began to take form, following the liberal views of his father. At the end, Edith’s life was taken from her in a gas chamber at Auschwitz by a nationalist form of socialism, known as Nazism.

Socialism, in all its forms, is simply Phase One of communism.

My readers will always hear me say, time and again, that my perspective on many of the issues affecting the Catholic Church and our society is greatly influenced by my experience as a survivor of communism. And I must tell you, that at the time of Edith Stein’s youth and young adulthood, many of her Jewish peers were knee-deep into socialism. This makes her conversion into Catholicism in 1922 even more intriguing, and further magnified by her spiritual embrace and entry into the Christian poverty of the Discalced Carmelites, where she took the name of Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.

Edith Stein’s death at Auschwitz is commemorated today, and I find myself thinking of her and of Teresa of Avila, the daughter of Spanish converso Jews, who dedicated her life to Christ through the charism of the Discalced Carmelite Order. Teresa of Avila greatly inspired Edith Stein in her path to holiness.

Sadly, Edith Stein’s canonization was criticized at the top of their lungs by major Jewish organizations, most of which were secular, forcing the Catholic hierarchy to issue explanations and justifications. This relentless criticism of the Catholic Church’s promulgation of Jews who convert to Catholicism has led the Vatican to temper its “tone” on the matter of Jewish apostasy, since the beginning of the socialist train-wreck known as the Second Vatican Council. An example of this is the modernist Novos Ordo Mass, which is an essential guidebook to anyone wishing to perfect their political correctness. As such, the administrators of the modernist socialist Vatican have actually pushed the Jewish people away from us, by obfuscating the divine etymology found in the love of Christ. I consider this obfuscating of God’s universal words of love, which by definition includes and often specifically addresses the Jewish people, to be a supreme example of antisemitism, given that God delivered this message of love by choosing the immaculate womb of a Jewish woman, the Virgin Mary, for the divine conception of His only Son.

What this really means is that Vatican officials want Catholics to meet Jews, Muslims and others in the socialist “safe space” which they have created. It’s called Ecumenism— a movement which has been intensely perforated by Marxists, inside and outside the Vatican. This casts a dark shadow on the modernist Vatican, particularly because socialist international power has shifted– and now most socialists hate both cultural and religious Jews, vis-à-vis the Middle East crisis.

This modernist socialist politically-correct approach by the Second Vatican Council has been echoed in today’s cornucopia of secular political correctness. We witness this repeatedly in the notorious “safe spaces”– which, at the end of the day, are only safe for socialists to express their total distortion of society, by altering the meaning of words, such as marriage and gender.

The world has been overtaken by the nightmare that Karl Marx started in the former Kingdom of Prussia, where Edith Stein lived. This socialist nightmare has infiltrated governments and institutions, with all its evil concomitant elements of Islamization, atheism, abortion, population control, promotion of homosexuality as a “human right” and denial of the traditional family. In other words, total absence of God’s divine truth.

In the midst of this madness, on a day like today, I invoke the intercession of those who have turned away from this atheist chaos and embraced Christ, as the way, the truth, and the life… like Edith Stein did.

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